The power of III

16 May 2012

The European Central Bank has stopped providing liquidity to some Greek banks as they have not been successfully recapitalized, the ECB said on Wednesday, confirming news earlier reported exclusively by Reuters.

The news sent the euro lower against the dollar, fanning concerns among investors and in Greece that the country may have to leave the euro zone.

The development highlights the weak state of the banking sector in Greece, where Greeks are pulling euros out of the banks in fear that their country may exit the European single currency despite the declared determination of EU powers Germany and France to keep Athens in the monetary union.

If you thought the Greek rollercoaster was a pain in the neck for investment markets, just wait until the whole of the EU is in a shambles!

Spain is next in line, with a 25% official unemployment rate and a massive black market economy forming. As I have been saying for years now, when governments disrupt the financial survival of the people, they WILL form their own alternatives, including black markets and barter markets. It is about survival. The Spanish government does not care much for these alternatives, though, and has now banned cash transactions over 2500 euros in a futile attempt to squeeze taxes out of the populace through digitally tracked payment methods:

...Financial disasters have always been a convenient catalyst for a host of even more frightening obstacles, including civil unrest, and blatant totalitarianism. This is the cusp. It is one of those moments that people of later generations read about in awe, and sometimes horror. The “doom” is not in the event, but in the response. What we make of the days approaching determines the darkness that they cast upon the future. It is a test. It is not something to be dreaded. It is something to be seized upon, and dealt with, as great men and women before us have done.

The twin peaks of oil and government are causally linked: central government's great era of expansion has been fueled by abundant, cheap liquid fuels. As economies powered by abundant cheap energy expanded, so did tax revenues.

Demographics also aided Central States’ expansion: as the population of working-age citizens grew, so did the work force and the taxes paid by workers and enterprises.

The third support of Central State expansion was debt, and more broadly, financialization, which includes debt, leverage, and institutionalized incentives for speculation and misallocation of capital. Not only have Central States benefited from the higher tax revenues generated by speculative bubbles, they now depend on debt to finance their annual spending. In the U.S., roughly one-third of Federal expenditures are borrowed every year. In Japan -- which is further along on this timeline, relative to America -- tax revenues barely cover social security payments and interest on central government debt; all other spending is funded with borrowed money.

The fourth dynamic of Central State expansion is the State’s ontological imperative to expand. The State has only one mode of being, expansion. It has no concept of, or mechanisms for, contraction.

In my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, I explain this ontological imperative in terms of risk and gain. From the Central State’s point of view, everything outside its control poses a risk. The best way to lower risk is to control everything that can be controlled. Once the potential sources of risk are controlled, then risk can be shifted to others.

Systemic risk has been transferred to you

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Put another way, once the State controls the entire economy and society, it can transfer systemic risk to others: to other nations, to taxpayers, etc.

In effect, the State’s prime directive is to cut the causal connection between risk and gain so that the State can retain the gain and transfer the risk to others. The separation of risk from gain is called moral hazard, and the key characteristic of moral hazard can be stated very simply: People who are exposed to risk and consequence act very differently than those who are not exposed to risk and consequence.

You people [the Republican establishment] are complaining, as usual, about anyone who challenges your entrenched and corrupt power, but now especially the Paulians, who are idealistic and dedicated to freedom. Do you want good relations with these wonderful people, who have donated millions of dollars and millions of hours to the greatest cause? Treat them with respect. Follow your own rules. Eschew shenanigans. Stop lying, cheating, and stealing. Then, maybe, you will be worthy to be in the same room with members of the Ron Paul grassroots.--Lew Rockwell

This past Sunday morning, I took to my blog, The New York Conservative, to opine on the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”) and his fellow terrorists. The full text of the post is available further below.The New York Conservative was a blog hosted by Google Blogger. I started the blog in February of this year and had posted 17 columns prior to the KSM entry, commenting on political matters and issues affecting the Catholic Church. I would post my entries on Facebook and occasionally would email a link to friends or other interested parties. I received no complaints about the blog whatsoever.On Monday, the pro-U.S. security group Secure American Now posted a link to my KSM piece on its website. The link received numerous hits and generated multiple comments on the Secure America Now page.

However, a few hours after Secure America Now linked to the New York Conservative, I received a form email, no reply possible, from Google Blogger informing me that the New York Conservative had been deleted. The email classified my blog as “spam” in violation of Google’s terms of service. There was no further explanation. My URL was dead; all of the content, everything I ever posted, was gone.I made two telephone calls to Google to protest and demand a reason for the deletion of my blog. The Google representatives told me that Google does not provide “live support” for Google Blogger, meaning you cannot speak with anyone at all about the deletion. The representatives directed me to the Google Blogger website, where the company extols its commitment to free speech and its great reluctance to censor its bloggers.

Obviously, I do not know why Google deleted my blog, but it's awfully odd that The New York Conservative was summarily executed after a post in which I called for the summary execution of KSM. Could it be that Google found the post politically incorrect and therefore offensive? Could it be that Google thought the post was dangerous because it had potential to incite Islamists?Given the company’s self-proclaimed devotion to free speech, I think Google ought to explain why it deleted the blog. If calling for the legal execution of the confessed mastermind of the murders of 3,000 people on American soil is too controversial a topic for Google Blogger, perhaps the famously progressive company should re-think its proclamation of support for the free exchange of ideas on its platforms.

I for one have no desire to find out that my 900 plus posts for the past two years have gone into ether because of some PC whim of a google admin. Screw that.

About Me

Father of three, religious, distrustful of any authority not able to consistently demonstrate competency at its mandated task. Lineally descended physically and spiritually from colonial leadership, Revolutionary War veterans, and veterans of the War of Northern Aggression.